Tutorial quote: Device-mapper is a new infrastructure in the Linux 2.6 kernel that provides a generic way to create virtual layers of block devices that can do different things on top of real block devices like striping, concatenation, mirroring, snapshotting, etc... The device-mapper is used by the LVM2 and EVMS 2.x tools. dm-crypt is such a device-mapper target that provides transparent encryption of block devices using the new Linux 2.6 cryptoapi. Writes to this device will be encrypted and reads decrypted. You can mount your filesystem on it as usual. But without the key you can't access your data. It does basically the same as cryptoloop only that it's a much cleaner code and better suits the need of a block device and has a more flexible configuration interface. The on-disk format is also compatible.